artist profile
Rose & Ali
about the artist
Rose and Ali are partners in life and in art. Their drawings are as much direct transpositions of their deepest instincts as they are carefully engineered compositions of an inimitable aesthetic. Highly realized, these pictures hover in the liminal zone between their realities and their imaginations. They’re seeing. They’re envisioning. They’re recalling. They’re projecting. The raw act of drawing is enriched by the concert of pigments varying in texture, chromatic quality as well as allowance (or prevention of) for layering. Executed in oil pastels, colored pencils and graphite, they follow in the artistic strategy of contemporaries such as Francis Alÿs and Kai Althoff. Their visual effects hearken to the unabashed sexuality and emotional intensity so treasured and lauded in the works on paper of 20th century figurative master Egon Schiele.
Rose and Ali’s art derives from an intimate observation of everyday life while collectively crystallizing a macroscopic reflection of society. Oftentimes, they appear as protagonists in their pictorial stories, illustrating the many contemporary settings a couple finds themselves in, be it ominous or mundane. Always, their figures are naked – they are tackling, without reserve, the neglected onslaughts in the living of life. Or are they invisible in the unforgiving eyes of the outside world? In every stroke of the hand, they compose and compile testimonies on anthropological, political and sociological concerns of their native region. Altogether, these culminate in a narrative that tells of a humanity confined in an ever-changing world.